Norman Vesprini posted a video on YouTube the week before Thanksgiving 2007 that to date has tallied more than 1.1 million views. He’s a 30-mile-a-week runner who enjoys an occasional pipe. He plays the banjo and roasts his own coffee, and he has the most expensive app in the App Store on his phone. A native Michigander, he somehow made it into his 40s without knowing where Notre Dame is, yet now he has almost certainly visited more campus buildings than you or I have. A community builder by disposition, he conceived of and has twice produced a “Hidden Talent Tuesday” concert showcasing the non-job-related creativity of University faculty and staff.
Most weekdays he maintains or repairs two or three large, expensive, human-powered machines, each of which has more than 10,000 parts, most of them moving. (The work is so intense, its quality so enhanced by achieving flow, that he willingly leaves himself prone to on-the-job jump scares while doing it.) He teaches two undergraduate courses; one is highly technical and specialized, the other probes the needs of mind, body and soul. He describes his enviably large, sunlit corner office on the sixth floor of O’Neill Hall of Music as a “graveyard for piano benches.”
On the job since 2016, Vesprini is Notre Dame’s first and only full-time piano technician, a position the president of the University once humbly admitted to Vesprini that he didn’t know existed.
But it does exist. Vesprini has four institutional clients, so to speak — the Department of Music; Sacred Music at Notre Dame; Student Affairs and Campus Ministry; and the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center. He manages most of the Notre Dame-owned pianos around campus. The majority are Steinways and Yamahas: one in each of the 33 residence halls and a bunch in various performance venues and rehearsal spaces, not to mention the 57 practice instruments housed in O’Neill, plus harpsichords and a fortepiano, totaling more than 110 instruments in all, each of which benefit vitally from his regular attention. This inventory has grown by 26 instruments since Vesprini arrived from the University of Michigan; he works almost entirely by house calls he makes on foot, pulling a cart laden with tools, supplies and a piano-bench-turned-workbench behind him.
It helps, he says, being a man of ritual, process, routine. “I don’t know where that comes from,” he admits. Sure, growing up in an industrial suburb of Detroit, he was always “wrenching” on his bikes. “The goal of early childhood was to make a go-kart of some sort,” he remembers, and he has since helped his own children race Pinewood Derby cars weighted with piano-key leads.
So, the tinkering, handyman part of Vesprini’s work has been evident all along. He tried engineering, though, and didn’t like it, switching to music as an undergraduate and pursuing those studies through to a master’s degree in piano performance at Michigan. There a music history professor took note one day of Vesprini’s habit of setting his Thermos on the same spot atop a radiator before class, and the professor said that arriving early to get ready to teach wouldn’t be the same without finding Vesprini sitting there, coffee poured, waiting. “And then he paused, and he said, ‘There’s something to be said for ritual,’” Vesprini recalls.
“I thought it was such a cool comment,” he says. “And if you’re going to be a piano technician, it’s helpful to enjoy that because so much of it is process. You do things 88 times, or some multiple of 88 times, so you better like it.”
Piano refinishing he didn’t like a bit — stripping off old finish, patching cases, prepping for finishers to do their thing. “It was all kind of subjective,” he explains. “Whereas when I have a piano action” — he holds up a mini-Rube-Goldberg assembly of key stick, shank, screws, levers, and other tiny obscurities that link the pianist’s touch to a hammer that sounds a string (or strings, since as many as three are struck in unison) — “and I have to tear it apart, put it back together, put new parts on it? That’s always very process- and steps-oriented.”
He likes that.
Being a piano tech, he explains over a cup of homeroast in his O’Neill studio, entails three broad tasks, which he uses automotive metaphors to explain. Tuning, the bulk of his job, involves basic wave physics, bringing into right relationship the vibrations of strings tethered at both ends. He likens it to putting gas in a car, and pianos that get the amount of use and abuse that Notre Dame’s do need such metaphorical refuelings frequently. Faculty studio pianos receive them twice each semester; chapel pianos maybe three times a year; performance pianos like the DPAC’s two concert grands see Vesprini and his special tools “every six weeks or so.”
The work is constant. Lining up pianos one at a time, he’d need three or four months to get through each one, only to restart the cycle. It’s also exhausting. Four full, 75-minute tunings in one day is the most he’ll ever do.
“It’s very physical,” he explains. “You’ve got to beat on the piano pretty hard” to test the changes in string tension — a matter of pinpoint precision and lasting stability. His primary tool, a tuning hammer or lever, looks like a lightweight, carbon-shafted socket wrench with an ultrasmooth handle made of bird’s-eye maple and ebony, and it touches every tuning pin. Pianos have as many as 250
of those.
Pushing himself on a typical job — the Steinway Boston piano in Dunne Hall’s Moreau Chapel, for instance — Vesprini works rapidly, even aggressively. Every movement of his hands, every repositioning of his body draws upon an enormous amount of experience and muscle memory, a refined ear and the selectively used help of that spendy tuning app, Reyburn CyberTuner. He lavishes the same intense focus on every wound string in the low bass, every set of bichord strings in the middle ranges and every trichord in the uppers that needs to be brought into unison. (Vesprini has refined opinions about the relative merits of aural and digital tuning and how to combine them that he’d happily share with you over a beverage.)
His second big job, regulation, involves repairing or replacing worn-out parts and making small adjustments to maximize responsiveness. Think of an engine tune-up, replacing filters and spark plugs. He handles most such work in-house. Large jobs, like rebuilding an instrument, would be sent out.
Last is voicing, which is about tone. Vesprini insists good voicing first requires good tuning; he made his case at the annual Piano Technicians Guild conference this past summer. The automotive metaphor strains a bit here (maybe detailing, he says) but the point is to get the hammers — made of densely pressed felt — to a sweet-spot of consistency so that, when they strike their strings, a Steinway, for instance, sounds like a Steinway, and musicians can forget mere mechanics and “simply create the phrasing, textures and colors” that express their art.
The tech is an accomplished musician himself. That viral, 2007 YouTube video features him performing his own arrangement of Metallica’s “Fade to Black” for solo piano. He’s since made other videos on various interests, including one (with nearly 1.1 million fewer views) that teaches Notre Dame pianists how to manage the climate-
control systems he installed on the pianos so they don’t dehydrate between tuning appointments.
Vesprini played four of Russian composer Alexander Scriabin’s piano preludes at the first Hidden Talent Tuesday in 2019. Colleagues have performed jazz standards or Italian pop songs or have read their own poetry. Fundamentally, it’s about sharing parts of themselves that their peers and students rarely get to see.
The same generosity of spirit enters his classroom, too. He teaches a section of Notre Dame’s Moreau personal formation program for first-year undergraduates, a task he loves, as well as a unique course in Applied Piano Technology he offers each spring. He caps it at six students, who aren’t all music majors. One didn’t even know how to read music. “That was challenging,” he admits.
If his first decade on campus has focused on learning the inventory, building his shop, setting high expectations and, he hopes, getting some tuning help, Notre Dame’s Piano Man would like the next 10 years to be about positioning it all to keep serving the University once he retires. He’s happy here. It’s more than the work, the cool tools, the ritual and even the pleasant environment of quiet, pretty chapels and the presence of the Lord, he says. It’s moving around and the people he gets to meet.
“I’ll come in and a student might be playing . . . or they come in while I’m tuning, and we will talk for 10 or 15 minutes about their background in piano,” he says. “It’s such a special gift to be here.”
John Nagy is managing editor of this magazine.